What is a Blog?

Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, about a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the best features of blogs. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles — also sometimes called “posts” or “entries.”

A Blog is a Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. A blog has unfiltered content — some feel that the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog.

Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.

RSS is at the heart of what makes a blog work. Remember a blog is a special website that allows easy web publishing with a content management system (CMS) and notifies the web each time a new article is posted (RSS). So how does this work?

Once you create a new article or posting, you are able to make this public by publishing what you wrote. When you publish, three things happen.

1. What you wrote immediately becomes visible to your blog visitors.
2. Your blog creates an RSS-XML file that is easily read by search engines and blog engines. These XML files are really a simple text file called a feed.
3. A ping is sent out to notify that you have something new on your blog. This invites blog engines and subscribers to look at your new content.

The blog ping that is sent out is a small XML file that contains the blog title, a brief description and a link to where the new content can be found. This ping is received by the major services which notifies search engines you now have new content.

The blog and search engines will either display the XML feeds they received or will send their own spiders back to retrieve more information. The results are, that what you write is being indexed and available on the Internet within minutes of being published. This is a similar process to the way news stories are released to the Internet.

Subscribers to your feed can either be notified by ping or their feed readers will regularly go back and check your RSS-XML files to see if anything new has been posted. When the reader finds updates, it makes them available to the recipient. The readers usually display the information from the XML files with a link to the content.